Biography
Author, educator, media historian and radio consultant.
Radio station WNEU, October 1968.
- Author of six books
- PhD in Communication — UMass Amherst, 2011
- Professor — Lesley University & Emerson College
- Mass. Broadcasters Hall of Fame, 2023
- Discovered the rock band Rush
Donna L. Halper, PhD is an award-winning professor of communication and media studies who has worked at several Boston-area universities. She is the author of six books and many articles in newspapers, magazines and academic journals. Her most recent book is a newly revised and expanded second edition of Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. She is also the author of a well-received local history, Boston Radio 1920–2010, which tells the story of Boston radio in words and pictures. In 2023 she was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame and given the Pioneer Broadcaster Award.
Dr. Halper is a widely quoted media historian, frequently called upon by newspapers, magazines and web publications to comment on trends in media. She is also a freelance writer, with published articles in outlets ranging from The Conversation and Radio World to the Baseball Research Journal, the Antique Wireless Association Review, JSTOR Daily, and Boston’s Catholic newspaper, The Pilot. She has written numerous biographical sketches on baseball history for SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research — including Ina Eloise Young, one of the first women baseball writers; Sherman “Jocko” Maxwell, the first Black sportscaster; Frank “Fay” Young, the dean of Black sportswriters; and the first Negro Leagues game broadcast on radio, in 1942.
Her research on media history and popular culture has led to appearances on both radio and television, including C-SPAN, CBS Sunday Morning, BBC-4, PBS NewsHour, CTV News in Toronto, NPR’s Weekend America, the History Channel, ABC Nightline, WBZ Radio and WBZ-TV, NBC 10 Boston, WGBH-FM and GBH-TV, WBUR-FM, and numerous podcasts and webcasts.
Dr. Halper is a frequent public speaker. A talk she gave at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown — “Written Out of History: Women Baseball Writers, 1905–1945” — was later published in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. She has also spoken at universities, libraries and civic organizations on subjects that include the history of fake news, the history of Boston radio, and changing representations of women and minorities on radio and television.
Donna Halper spent more than four decades in broadcasting, including over 28 years as a radio programming and management consultant, working with both college and commercial stations all over North America. Before becoming a consultant she spent thirteen years as an announcer, music director and assistant program director in four major markets. She is also well known for discovering the rock band Rush, who dedicated their first two albums to her; she appears in the 2010 documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage and in a 2020 Fantoons music video marking the 40th anniversary of “The Spirit of Radio.”
She attended Northeastern University in Boston, where she became the first woman announcer in the school’s history, broadcasting a nightly show on the campus radio station beginning in October 1968. She earned a BA in English, an M.Ed. in Counseling and an MA in English at Northeastern, and received her PhD in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in May 2011, writing her dissertation on how early radio changed American society.
Dr. Halper was a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 2008 to 2024, developing and teaching courses in Media Analysis, Communication Ethics, Political Communication and Introduction to Journalism, and advising the student newspaper she helped create, the Lesley Public Post. Before Lesley she spent 18 years as an instructor at Emerson College in Boston, teaching in the Journalism Department and the Institute for Liberal Arts.
In addition to her 2023 Hall of Fame induction and Pioneer Broadcaster Award — the first woman ever to win it — she received a Distinguished Achievement Award from Lesley University in 2024 and a Broussard Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2021 for her historical research and her use of Restorative Narratives. In 2018 she was awarded the 9th Annual Collectors’ Prize by Historic New England for her collection of rare broadcasting memorabilia. Since 1984 she has been an advocate for an adult with autism, and has also served as a mentor, tutor and Big Sister.